FDA is not going to make it easy to pick your fish

Posted September 27, 2010 - 16:10
by
David Gomez

Is the Food and Drug Administration on a roll or what? If you’re a food supply baron, then the answer is a resounding yes!

They sure have been making it easy for the food industry to act like tricksters. The supposedly impartial government agency is now making the sale of genetically modified fish even easier for the mad science company that will produce them.

The FDA said last week that they cannot require AquAdvantage fish to be labeled as "modified."

Why not?

Well, according to the rules if they deem it safe for sale and consumption, they cannot then force the company that produces them to label it in a way that would mark it as different from other fish available for sale.

So for those keeping track at home, The Washington Post says the fish has "a gene from the ocean pout, an eel-like fish, and a growth hormone from a Chinook salmon."

And yet, there can be no labeling to let the public know they are buying a fish that is comprised of such nonsense.

Hilarious!

Even worse, the WaPo reports that it is actually quite hard for food companies to display that their foods are not genetically modified.

As consumers get wise to the unknown risks posed by genetically altered food, the FDA is there to make sure the consumer will not have the knowledge they need to make an educated decision.

The biotechnology industry claims that the mandatory labeling would confuse consumers. They say labels on the genetically modified fish would differentiate them from other fish when there is no difference.

So, no need to easily confuse the simple minded consumer with details on where the hell their food comes from, right?

All of this asinine red tape with food labeling and GMO comes just at a time when people have begun to care about it.

Let me just pull one more juicy chunk of text from the WaPo story to drive my point home:

"In the European Union and Japan, it is nearly impossible to find genetically modified foods, largely because laws require labeling," said William K. Hallman, director of the Food Policy Institute at Rutgers University. "No one wants to carry products with such a label. The food companies figure that consumers won't buy it."

What is happening here in the United States with the FDA is pretty clear. They are granting favors to the hugely profitable food companies.

The U.S. government and the food industry are making decisions that the public should be making.

And as we can see from the Post story, the FDA is clearly trying to protect the market for the AquAdvantage. In my opinion they are protecting this market for the investors.

It’s common knowledge that Wall Street controls policy decisions in America. I am willing to bet that there are a lot of Wall Street tycoons who have invested in this GMO fish because they believe it will be big.

Why are they gambling on the luck of the GMO fish selling? Because the powerful Wall Street personalities know that there won’t be any snags with this profitable fish hitting the market.

Because the FDA, an agency created to protect us from dangerous food, won’t do a damn thing to stand in the way of a product that is a moral dilemma wrapped in a quagmire.